Today at the Nokia World 2013 held in Abu Dhabi, Nokia announced their new Refocus camera app for the Lumia 1520. Refocus promises users the freedom to selectively change the area of the photo, which is in focus.

The Nokia Refocus is a separate camera app for Lumia phones (unlike what we first heard). The camera app aims to reproduce the shallow depth of field that pro cameras have and it does that in a really high-quality way. Details about how it works are scarce at the moment so we are not quite sure whether it snaps a series of images and stacks them into an image, where you can dynamically manipulate the active focus point or if it maps out the depth of the image and subsequently creates the lens blur purely artificially but in a nice looking way.

Whatever it is, that’s one of the best implementations I have seen in adding lens blur to smartphone photos.

A lot of people may come up and say, “But hey, I want everything in focus,” and while that’s a valid argument, you have got to remember that modern day phones already have pretty much everything in focus. What’s actually hard to achieve with their relatively small sensors (sensor size is not about the number of megapixels) is to have one area in focus, and have everything else defocused. And when I say defocused, I mean it just like that, a high-quality lens blur, not some simple post-processing effect that you smudge on your photo via Instagram.

As I said, unfortunately, details about the technology are currently pretty scarce, BUT we already have the first samples ready for inspection.

The images are posted online at http://refocus.nokia.com. You can click anywhere on the sample photos and see the focus move to the point in real time. Enjoy what you can do with these samples and imagine having that functionality on your phone.

Let us know what you think about the technology in the comments below.